


It Ends Like This

by LadyJanelly



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Homeless, Anxiety Disorder, Depression, Homelessness, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-06
Updated: 2016-06-06
Packaged: 2018-07-12 17:31:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7115527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyJanelly/pseuds/LadyJanelly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The night before the draft, Jack runs from his problems instead of trying to medicate them away. He finally ends up where he's supposed to be, years later and in markedly different circumstances.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It Ends Like This

**Author's Note:**

> (More not-fic than fully fleshed out fic. TW for homelessness, addiction, sex work [non graphic] dissociation, panic attacks, anxiety, mental illness. If I missed any warnings, please let me know and I’ll change it. Fic has a happy ending)

It starts like this: Jack in a hotel room, the echoes of Kenny slamming the door still ringing in his ears. A bottle of pills in his hand. 

But doubling his prescription hasn’t helped anything, hasn’t quieted the desperate what-if what-if what-if voices in his head. Tripling hasn’t helped either, just left him feeling sick and disconnected for days at a time.

He leaves the bottle. His keys, his ID, his parents’ credit cards. Takes the cash out of his wallet and leaves the rest by the bathroom sink. Grabs what clothes he has here into a duffel bag and walks away. Steps out onto a street in Buffalo, New York and breathes free for the first time in years.

The next weeks are honestly terrible. Sleeping in a rattrap of a hotel, coming off of his meds. Tired all the time but unable to sleep. Shaky and achy and no appetite at all. Despairing at losing all that hard-won muscle weight, and then realizing it doesn’t matter at all. 

He travels. Knows people are probably looking for him, so he flees ahead of their disappointment. Their concern. Heads east because he doesn’t have his passport. Doesn’t have anywhere else to be.

He learns the rules of the street, where to find under the table work, how early he has to be at a shelter if he wants a bed there. He learns where all the soup kitchens are. How to look stoic and pitiful and get an extra biscuit.

It’s a stressful life, but so different from the one he was living. He worries about being hungry, about getting rolled. His fears are immediate and concrete and being afraid all the time feels normal. Reasonable. A few times, he gets so short of funds he takes the quick money. Goes to his knees for some John in a back alley, opens his mouth and turns off his mind and just lets it happen to him. 

Nobody is disappointed in him but himself, and even that fades after a few years. 

He’s standing outside a grocery store with “Will work for food” written on his piece of cardboard, and this blond boy walking in pauses, looks him up and down, and Jack. Feels the stir of shame in his chest, foreign after so long without it. 

The boy goes inside and Jack makes pleading eyes at a few more customers. Gets a few dollars dropped in his hand. A harried mother comes by with twins in her cart and one of them drops a rattle. It rolls his way so he picks it up. Her face goes tight, but she takes it from him, wraps it in a tissue and puts it in her purse.

The blond boy is back, with a cart full of grocery bags. He looks at Jack again, and Jack tries not to flinch under his appraising look.

“You mean it?” the boy asks, and Jack isn’t sure what he’s talking about. Then the boy nods at his sign and Jack remembers what he wrote, and nods. He’s never been afraid of work. 

“Well come on then,” the boy says in a sweet southern accent, “I don’t got all day.”

Jack jumps to follow behind him, to help him unload the cart (seriously, are there three bags filled with nothing but butter??). Gets in the passenger seat of the decrepit old hatchback when the boy nods for him to.

===========

Eric drives back to the Haus with his hands tight on the wheel to keep them from shaking. What the hell had he been thinking?

He looks over at his passenger, bushy beard, blue eyes, shaggy hair. The guy smells, and he’s staring at the dash like a man that’s just hollow inside, and this is the dumbest thing Eric has done in his life. Just. The man had looked so sad. He couldn’t walk away.

He wracks his brain trying to think of something he can have this guy do for them. It seems mean to have him try to tackle the mold in the shower, but he can’t think of much else that needs doing.

He pulls up and the guy gets out. Shoulders his back pack and grabs half the groceries in one load. Eric leads the way and shows him to the kitchen and his sense of hospitality is at war with trying to fill the role of boss. 

“Y’all can just put those there if you don’t mind,” he says, gesturing at the counter by the fridge, and the man does so, goes back to get the couple bags Eric couldn’t handle. 

“I don’t think I caught your name,” Eric says when he comes back in, a little more settled now that he’s in his environment. 

“Jack,” the man says, and Eric knows he should shake his hand, but he’d have to wash it then, before he could touch food, and Lord, which would be least-rude to do? 

“Eric,” Eric says. “Nice to meet you.”

Jack nods and Eric sees another glimpse of vulnerability in his eyes, a lost soul looking for home and he remembers why he picked him up. 

“Bathroom’s through there, if you’d like to get cleaned up before dinner,” Eric says. 

Jack looks a little uncertain, but he goes, and Eric is glad to have a minute to breathe without those blue eyes starin’ through him. 

==========

Jack washes up in a bathroom that’s messier than some gas stations he’s taken a stand-up-bath in. He’s not honestly sure where he’s been kidnapped to. Somewhere near the Samwell campus maybe. He’d thought the houses were nicer than this in that neighborhood though.

When he gets out, there are bowls on the table and Eric is rolling out a sheet of dough. Jack stays out of the way, stands back so he won’t get street-dirt on anything. 

“You have a seat,” Eric says, “I just need to get this pie in the oven before the boys get back from class.”

Even the sight of raw dough makes Jack’s stomach rumble. 

“You said you had work for me?” he prompts. The sooner he does it, the sooner he gets fed, right? Eric doesn’t strike him as the kind of guy to stiff him. 

Although the shiftiness in Eric’s face when he says that makes Jack wonder.

“Of course I do,” Eric says, and he swoops to the fridge, gets a bag of frozen peaches out of the freezer, a casserole dish out of the fridge, pops them both into the microwave. 

The casserole dish turns out to be some noodle and cream sauce with chicken pieces and peas in it, and if Eric is feeding him before the job is done, Jack sure isn’t going to complain about it. 

Jack eats and Eric gets the pie ready to bake and then starts on some kind of little tarts. “I’ll show you that project in just a minute,” Eric says, and Jack really shouldn’t feel as safe as he does, but he lays his head down. Rests his eyes for just a minute.

“Hey Bitty, who’s this?” 

And Eric (okay, Jack thinks the “Bitty” thing is kind of adorable) ends up introducing him to a string of bros as “My friend Jack,” and then it would be awkward to keep hassling Eric for work. He just has to kind of roll with it, until Eric is like “So hey, do you need a ride back?” And yeah, Jack doesn’t want to walk that far, but he doesn’t want Eric to see just how bad the place he’s staying is. He takes the offer but once they’re in the car he tells Bitty to just drop him at the grocery store.

“Hey,” Eric says, his fingertips light on Jack’s wrist, and Jack can’t remember the last kind touch he’s received. “If you need work again, come by the Haus. I’ll pick up some paint so you can do the porch. There’s always leftovers, and if not, I’ll whip you up something.” 

“Okay, thanks,” Jack says, and Eric gives him a sad little smile as he gets out of the car.

================

So Jack doesn’t go back, but Eric sees him outside the grocery store again, and it’s gonna rain, so he grabs him up again and takes him home, feeds him and has Jack help him rearrange the upper cabinets that Eric can’t reach without a stool. 

The next time it’s not raining, so Jack scrapes the loose paint off of the porch and gives it a new coat and Eric feeds him peach pie better than any Jack’s had in his life.

The fourth time is washing the ground-floor windows, and cherry cobbler so sweet and tart Jack’s cheeks cramp up. 

The fifth time, Eric is filling Jack’s glass with sweet tea and Jack realizes that he likes this. That he’d miss it if it was taken away, this warm little house and Bitty’s soft flow of words. He could _lose_ this and it would hurt and the idea of it sucks the breath out of his lungs. 

He can’t breathe. Can’t breathe and can’t think. He tries to get up, get away, but the chair falls over and trips him up. He falls on his ass, hits his elbow, scrambles back from the pain until his back hits the cabinets. 

And Bitty is there. Not touching him, not crowding him. Sitting a foot away saying “C’mon, breathe with me Jack. I know you got it in you. In-two-three, out-two-three.” 

It takes a while, but he calms down. Shitty goes by the door a few times, checking on them, but Bitty waves him off. 

They talk it out a little, when the attack is over. Bitty asking if he did anything to cause it, if it was going to happen again. Asking if Jack was going to stop coming, because he just bought paint for the window sills and shutters, and he still needs help with the curtain rods.

So Jack keeps coming, and he still gets flashes of panic, but it’s worth enduring them, to keep coming back.

He gets to know all the guys, and he thinks Bitty has told them about him, why he’s here. That he doesn’t have a home. Everybody’s polite though, and that’s more than he expected. 

He does all the upkeep the Haus has fallen behind on, and Bitty teaches him to roll a pie crust when he over-extends himself on a bake-sale, and Jack finds he has a place, sort of. More of a place than he’s had in years. 

When the weather is terrible, or he would be leaving too late to get a bed at the shelter, Bitty invites him to sleep on their couch. Nasty as it is, it’s better than freezing to death. 

Winter Screw is coming up, some big annual party they do here, and Jack is trying to plan where he’s going to stay that weekend, when Holster and Ransom corner him.

“Tell us the truth,” Holster says, and both of them are bigger than Jack, taller and broader. “We see you looking at Bitty, but you never make a move. Are we reading something wrong? You do like him, right?”

His heart pounds in his chest. 

He shakes his head. 

Ransom smiles, claps him on the back. “So what’s the problem?” 

“He. I’m not. He deserves. Better,” Jack manages to gasp out.

“Yeah, well, he seems pretty darn happy with you, so you’re taking him to Winter Screw, and we’re getting you ready.”

Jack finds himself kidnapped. Again.

=============

Outside the Haus, a man with a very expensive camera snaps a photo through the curtains. Catches the look on Jack’s face as he resigns himself to whatever preparations the duo has in store for him.

=============

Eric should have known, when the boys stopped pestering him about who he’s taking to Screw. Should have guessed they had something sneaky planned.

He’s just putting the finishing touches on the refreshments table when Shitty dances into his kitchen. “There’s a surpriiiise, waiting for you in the liiiiving room,” Shitty sing-songs at him, and Eric wipes his hands, wonders what these boys have done now.

“Your date’s here!” Holster hollers as Eric comes out of the kitchen, and there’s a man there, tall and so handsome, dark hair and blue blue eyes. Clean-shaven and his hair freshly cut. Wearing Ransom’s navy-blue henley. 

The man shifts nervously, and Eric can’t stop staring. He’s beautiful, sharp cheekbones and chiseled jaw. He needs feeding up, but Eric can keep working on that project.

“Jack?” he whispers. “Oh my goodness! Look at you! You were handsome before, but this…wow.”

And Jack looks like he wants nothing more than to melt into the floor, and it breaks Eric’s heart so he crosses to him, takes his trembling hand. 

They end up taking a few beers and a pie up to Eric’s room and listening to the party from up there, just lying in Eric’s bed and talking, sharing chaste gentle touches, fingertips brushing elbow and throat and cheek. The absolute lightest of kisses.

They fall asleep there together, on Eric’s narrow bed, the air around them still throbbing with the sound of the party. 

They stumble down in the morning, across the debris of bottles and cups, overturned chairs and lost underwear. 

Eric is halfway to the kitchen when someone knocks on the door. He changes course, wonders who it could possibly be this time of morning (it’s ten already, but anybody who would be coming by would know that the Haus was a party zone until nearly dawn). 

There’s a man on the porch, sharp dressed with hard eyes. An older couple clinging to each other behind him. The man is very tall, the woman very pretty.

“Oh dear Lord,” Eric murmurs. What the hell happened last night?

“Excuse me,” the man says, only a thin veneer of politeness in his tone, “We’re looking for Jack Zimmerman. Is he here?” 

Eric shifts, knows Jack is behind him somewhere. Tries to shield him from sight, but he’s so small he doesn’t have a lot to work with. 

Jack’s hands are warm on his shoulders, trembling. “Maman?” His voice cracks and the couple rush the porch, shouldering past the man in the suit. 

Eric isn’t sure how he got trapped, Jack’s arm around his shoulders, keeping him close even as the older couple embrace him like the long-lost son he apparently is. 

There are tears and apologies and Eric eventually gets the breathing room to break in and invite them into his wreck of a kitchen, where he starts a new pot of coffee and digs a hidden pie out of the freezer to heat up for them to eat while they talk.

Eric flutters around trying to clean up, trying to make the place presentable, or at least not condemnable and Jack reaches out and catches his sleeve, draws him to sit down at the table. 

“Maman et papa. This is Eric. He saved me.”

==========

It takes Jack a while to get his life sorted out. Everybody agrees that pulling him away from his friends, his social supports, is a terrible idea. Bob and Alicia rent a house for themselves just out of the Samwell city limits, and Jack sleeps there half the time, in Eric’s bed the other half. They get him into therapy, and on a more strictly managed medication regimen. Jack shadows one of the guys to classes when he breaks his foot, to carry his bags and help him with the crutch, and he thinks maybe he’d like to do the school thing, here, with people he already knows. People who have already seen him at his worst.

Bitty stays in Samwell for most of the summer, and they make love for the first time in his room, quiet and gentle. 

Jack enrolls in the fall. He takes photography and history. He spends hours at the rink taking pictures of the team, of Bitty, but he never sets foot on the ice. 

Bitty graduates and the Zimmermans give him an interest-free loan to set him up with a little bakery, and Jack works there part-time while he finishes his degree and while he writes his first book—a look at how addiction affected the best sports players in history.

The anxiety, the depression, it hides sometimes, for weeks or months, but always resurfaces somewhere. They’re ready for it though, to fight it with love and with the tools Jack’s counselor gave them. 

He wakes up on the morning of his thirtieth birthday and realizes he made it through. 

It ends like this: Life isn’t perfect, but it is good.


End file.
